This is pretty amazing.

More detail at SMH:

As the game [America's Army - an interactive project funded by the Pentagon which it uses to enlist recruits] continues around him after he is killed - and usually under a hail of abuse from the other players - DeLappe types in the name, age, service branch and the date of death of each soldier.

EcoGeek reports: “Wal-Mart has announced that its electronic suppliers will have to fill out scorecards indicating the environmental impact of its products”.

It’s voluntary and un-scrutinized, but it’s a start. It would be cool if the manufacturers, or Wal-Mart, published the results on the web - though I doubt we’ll see that, except maybe from the ones that perform well…

Priscilla posts a great chart for non-profits considering the social/participant media space: Does effort = effect?. An excellent method for evaluating which tools to invest in.

The video below is a great, no-fuss, easy to grok description of RSS and feed readers. [via Blogging Pro]

It focuses on web-based readers - for those on Mac I can also recommend NetNewsWire - my fave for a long time, or the free Vienna.

Click To Play

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people; if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes of RSS in Plain English.

Laurel has the best description I’ve seen of PayPal, ever:

Even if there had been a PayPal donation button on the screen, chances are I wouldn’t have bothered. Too hard. Paying by PayPal is the equivalent of seeing a gossip mag in a newsagency, putting it on the desk, scooting across 2 streets dodging traffic to the bank, lining up, getting a bank cheque for $1.20, paying the bank a small fee, running back… only by this time, another page errr store has caught your eye and you are off window shopping again.

I know some people that have great experience with PayPal. Mine experience has been woeful. On one site I visited that accepted credit card payments via PayPal, it wouldn’t let me pay using the card because it was listed in my PayPal account. A forgotten password, and expired card, and 30 minutes later I was able to pay.

I think the trick is if you use PayPal regularly, it’s ok. But if you’re an irregular user, like I am, it’s a nightmare. Too many hoops. Too many “security” features that stop me from making a payment. Too hard…

I considered it once for the WWF site. And I’m considering it as a method of payments for the Fuzu EP. If only there was an alternative that fulfills the promise…

Laurel goes on to make some suggestions (which are interesting), but what made me laugh was her description. Perfect!

Jacob’s latest column is pretty much on the money.

I’m super busy with Earth Hour at the moment, so these comments will be brief.

• At NETaccounts, a huge amount of effort has gone into (and continues to go into) making sure that the user can type in values, and we encourage that by using auto-complete and other mechanisms where possible. We did this because we watched how experienced and inexperienced users used NETaccounts and other software. Providing lists helps and hinders, depending on the user. Answer - intelligently support both.
• I currently use a site that was developed by someone else. Care was not taken with data input (e.g. not auto-including “http://” at the front of URLs when not entered by the user) and it is costing us days worth of human-hours to fix.
• Drop-down menus are pretty sucky on Mac browsers (Firefox and Safari both make them difficult to use, especially for mouse-less navigation - Camino get’s it right). Even more reason to avoid them.
• Sites that don’t allow spaces and basic punctuation for phone numbers really annoy me. +61 (0)2 9123-4567 is a valid phone number - even for a local person. Allow for more than 10 digits to allow for international numbers. Strip the punctuation on the server side if you need to, but let the user enter in what they want. This bites hard, particularly on highly trafficked sites.

Anyone got any other usability annoyances they want to share?

You grew up fast… and Latest trends. Clever.

Seems that Twitter has hit somewhat of a tipping point - I’m reading about it everywhere on blogs. But this post by Dave Winer caught my attention today.

Seems the NYT is using Twitter to send alerts about new content being added to their site. I’m not quite sure on the benefits of this, but it’s an interesting use of the system. I read recently, can’t remember who said it (I think it was Seth Godin), that a sign of success is when people start using your product in unexpected ways.

Interesting… I wonder (aloud) how this might benefit other businesses? Does it provide any significant benefits over standard RSS feeds? Any thoughts?

(p.s. my profile, for those that are interested)

Just had someone ring up complaining that we don’t support Netscape 2 properly. What can I say?

What is it about file sharing sites today - both MediaFire and Dropload are down…